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Wednesday, October 10, 2012

MAN UP

Well, its that time of year again. Its a little bit cooler and people start to go indoors and spread disease among themselves. First up in the season: vomitting, diarrhea. With this in my I present the following:

DEAR MR/MRS JOHN/JANE Q. PUBLIC:

If you have vomitting or diarrhea or combination of the two and are somebody who is in a normal state of health, IT IS NOT AN EMERGENCY. REPEAT, IT IS NOT AN EMERGENCY. It is most likely a virus you have picked up in your travels through the world.

DO NOT COME TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM. WE DON"T WANT TO SEE YOU. You clog up the system, fill the chairs in the waiting room, spreading your virus to others. You take beds from people having an MI, a dissecting aorta, a stroke, a major trauma.

Your day or two or even three or four of vomitting or diarrhea will not kill you. You will recover. It takes time.

If the hospitals don't want "this" or "that," then why don't they take a different tack and get on TV, radio, and online and do some public education: "Really, a day or two or even three or four of vomitting or diarrhea will not kill you. You will recover. It takes time. Push the fluids, blah, blah..."

There will always be a portion of the public that have nothing better to do than go sit in a ER waiting room, but there are also some very intelligent others who come into your ERs unnecessarily, because we are not highly trained healthcare pros, and all we know is that we are feeling very sick and the regular doctor is unavailable, and perhaps we live in an area that doesn't have any urgent-cares.

The state police and the mayor's office and the school systems all have official spokespersons who go out and deliver messages to the public. What you ER people apparently need to do is get out there on a soapbox and start drumming the desired patient behaviors into patients' heads before they even cross your doorsills.

For liability reasons obviously. For the 99 people who have tum tum aches there will be a hundredth with something deadly and other presenting symptoms they either forgot to mention on the phone or just aren't trained enough to catch. Even with this though vomitting x 1 or diarrhea x 1 is not a GD emergency, take a common sense approach before you call 911 or go to the ER. Another favorite of mine is 'chest pain' which is really epigastric/stomach pain post eating spicy barbecue whose pain of 6/10 becomes 2/10 after burping. Common sense dictates Maalox first, not ER visit/911!